rhetorical analysis isn't just for school I mean sure it usually is for school but that's not going to stop me welcome back welcome back now I don't know about you but I'm genuinely excited to talk about rhetorical analysis not only is it a common assignment in school but it's also a method at the foundation of what rhetoricians do and more importantly it's a tool for thinking carefully about the messages that are coming at you all the time rhetoricians are fond of saying that one of the oldest examples of graffiti that we have is a message
scrolled on an ancient wall that says in essence if you don't learn rhetoric you'll always be its victim rhetoric is the art of persuasion so it's useful to be able to understand the ways in which others might be trying to persuade you and of course sometimes persuasion can be used for good like encouraging you to brush your teeth but it can also be used to harm exploit or deceive and it's not really the objective of this show to tell you what you personally should find persuasive but you ought to be deliberate about what's persuading you
when you get good at rhetorical analysis you'll be in a better spot to recognize how and why other people are trying to influence you and that will help you to make better decisions about what you do allow to influence you I mean as long as you're buying that food processor because the ad shows how it will genuinely meet your need and not just because you unwittingly went along with its persuasive presentation so today I want to show you how to approach rhetorical analysis we'll walk through it in kind of a formalized way so that it
will still be helpful to you if you are struggling with a rhetorical analysis assignment but I also want to talk about how it's useful outside of assignments because of course if the only reason you're doing something is for an assignment then it's probably not a thing that's worth doing okay so we've talked about analysis on the show before and I'd recommend watching that video first just as a place to start but I will summarize it briefly here so that we understand analysis in general before we add the rhetorical spin to it so even though people
like to act like analysis is complicated and difficult it really just involves answering three questions in order to explain how something works what so what and how do you know or what do you notice what is its purpose or function and how do you know it works in the way that you say like we talked about in that first video take apart a pen identify its individual components explain how those pieces contribute to the Pen's purpose of writing and then justify your thought process it really is pretty easy now of course that's just analysis in
general but there are specialized kinds of analysis that ask you to pay attention to particular kinds of things and to explain how they serve their individual purposes so rhetorical analysis follows the same pattern as general analysis but it pays special attention to how something is working to persuade its audience or as I like to think about it to motivate its audience to think feel or do something different and anything that was created for a rhetorical purpose is up for analysis speeches and advertisements are common and easy targets for this kind of work but paintings music
and even physical spaces can have some persuasive effect and our job as rhetorical analysts is to identify their individual components and explain how they work to influence the intended audience so in your analysis you could explain how the opening scene of a movie persuades viewers to see the villain as a credible threat or how a classroom setup influences teachers to give lectures instead of group activities or even of course how a campaign ad encourages voters to vote for a specific candidate really the question is what does your rhetorical artifact and that's what we'll be calling
the thing you're analyzing what does it want its audience to think feel or do and then how does it influence them to think feel or do that thing and you explain that how by answering the questions what so what and how do you know which is of course tons of fun to talk about in theory but let's look at a real rhetorical artifact and see how this all works so my friends here's a poster from 1957 created by Alice provon why are we looking at this poster well because it's safely in the public domain so
shout out to the Library of Congress but also because at least as far as the entry at the library goes we don't actually have a lot of extra historical information about this poster and I point that out because it might be tempting to just go out and try to look things up in order to explain the thing you're analyzing but that's not the job we're doing in the wild this poster would have shown up on a wall somewhere and it's all the intended audience probably would have seen so everything they need to be persuaded is
right here plus even if we did find an interview with the artist explaining her intent it wouldn't really help us that much the question we're trying to answer is not what did the artist mean to do it's how does this poster as presented work and even if the poster is all we have the good news is it's really all we need so first things first just based on what we see in this poster what would you say its primary purposes why does it exist what is it trying to influence its audience to think feel or
do now before you answer which of course you can't really since this is a one-way deal we've R into trap number one you might be tempted to say that this poster exists to show people that books are good and full of Adventures and it is true that this is a major message of the poster but that's not what the poster is for in a similar way it's common to see student writers analyzing something like a sappy life insurance commercial and then say that the purpose of the ad is to help viewers see that family is
important and yeah but that's not why the ad exists maybe I'm being overly cynical but I really doubt the life insurance company woke up one morning and said you know maybe we should make a short film about how great families are no way friends they want you to pay for their life insurance and that's the underlying purpose of the advertisement so yes in this poster we get the core message that we can explore with books but why the purpose is clearly to get people to participate in book week whatever book week is the people in
charge of it want other people to participate in it and this poster is the tool they're using to influence that audience to participate and speaking of audience who do we think this poster is trying to influence again beginning analysts are often quick to say things like everyone or the general public but the answer is never everyone like with advertisements companies don't spend time and money doing focus groups market research and collecting customer demographic data just to make ads for everyone everything has a more specific audience in mind and our job as analysts is to be
as specific as possible so what audience is the creator trying to appeal to I think it's probably safe to say that the primary intended audience is Children First and most obviously because there's all kinds of kids here wandering through the open books so if we want to think about who the book week people are trying to get to explore books it's reasonable to say that kids would see themselves reflected in this poster and identify themselves with that purpose it can be helpful too to consider what would happen if something were different especially at first it
might be challenging to pinpoint what something is doing or how it works so stepping back into a parallel reality can help you to see what's really going on so for example what happens if we imagine all the books on the this poster with these titles obviously that changes things so given that we don't live in this reality how do the titles of the existing books support our hypothesis that the target audience is kids well they all seem to have a child oriented appeal to them simple accessible even with pictures and illustrations in and on them
it's a bunch of kids and a bunch of kids books so Book Week 1957 is probably an event for kids or at least a larger event with a component for kids and I do think it would also be reasonable to say that parents are a potential secondary audience they may after all have to get their kids to book week and there might be something to the appeal of seeing well- behaved children spending time with serious educational or literary books that could work on parents but to keep things simple for today we'll just focus on the
children and of course children is reasonable but you could get more specific while there may be something here that could appeal to any child we could always narrow it down further like it would be really easy to eliminate children who can't read or who can't read English since all of these books are written in English and we might be able to justify assumptions about other things like for example do you think the creators have children from families of a certain socioeconomic class in mind based either on the depictions of the children or the titles of
the books at any rate we have enough at this point to articulate the fundamental purpose of this poster it exists to motivate children to participate in book week before you do anything else with rhetorical analysis you want to be able to State clearly what your artifact is doing and who its intended audience is and from there the question is how how does this poster motivate children to participate in book week and to answer that question we should begin by answering the question what this is where we take the pen apart and identify its individual pieces
so what specific details do we notice here and again be as specific as possible we've got the words explore with books along the top written all caps and in various colors blues and their neighbors along with some Browns that all harmonize with the covers of the books we've got some kids one with a butterfly net some hanging out in pears one I guess pantomiming ice skating three of them are smiling and we've got big old books set up almost like a maze or a museum display they're bigger than the kids and the kids all seem
to be wandering among those books and checking out what they're all about and those books have poetry about boats stories from other times Undersea Adventures nature stuff pictures of hot air balloons and Leaning Towers and even the story of allice and Wonderland and again we could always be more detailed we could talk about cover design details of the children's clothing and more but even the things we've identified already are a great start so once you've collected a good number of responses to the question what we then need to talk about what each of these components
or details is doing how do they contribute to the artifacts overall purpose or if we're thinking about the pen how do the parts of the pen contribute to the purpose of writing and if you're doing this for school the vast majority of assignments will probably ask you to organize the so whats in terms of ethos posos and logos so you'll explain how different details establish trust between the audience and Creator how details get the audience to care about the persuasive goal and how the details show that the desired outcome is reasonable for example you might
say the fact that the kids generally appear to be smiling or to be having fun Works to show the audience that you can have a good time with books believe it or not and that book week is going to be a fun joyful experience in that case we're talking about pathos the Happy Kids motivate the audience to participate in Book Week by showing that books and by extension Book Week are a good time if the kids in the poster are happy about it the kids viewing the poster probably would be too and now they're invested
emotionally in participating if you are doing an assignment and you're required to talk about ethos posos and logos I've got a video that explains each of them and how they work usually when people talk about rhetorical analysis this is what they think of playing a game of spot the ethos or point out the logos but the reality is that this is just one kind of rhetorical analysis that because it uses Aristotle's three basic appeals as a guide is known as Neo Aristotelian analysis so whether you're using Aristotle's three things Kenneth Berg's pentad a el Becker's
philological relations or something else as long as you're explaining how the details of your artifact work to to motivate the audience to do think or feel something different you're doing your job again let's practice a little we already got the attitudes of the kids and how that might be persuasive to the audience but what about the selection of books on this poster we could say that they all contribute to the sense of adventure or exploration that the poster promises so it motivates kids to participate in Book Week by promising Grand Adventures or we could say
in a similar vein that the choice of books reassures kids that the event really is for kids so it motivates them by showing them that it's not just an event they can go to but that it's an event designed for them and at this point these might feel a little bit like Hollow assertions and you'd be right we really need to answer that third question how do you know in order to make this complete and as a hint to my school assignment writers out there answering the how do you know is where I see students
fall down the most you've got to explain your thought process so yes we can say that the books all appeal to a kid's sense of adventure but how do we know that it's really doing that this is a question to check your reasoning to make sure that you're drawing a reasonable conclusion well check it out the books all talk about different things things that are generally separate from what kids maybe normally do these books take us deep under sea or up in a hot air balloon they promise to take us to far off places or
the distant past even a magical Wonderland so this poster isn't just making a hollow assertion that books are Adventures it provides seven different examples of books that can enable children to explore amazing things each book offers a distinct kind of Adventure something new or different or exciting lose yourself in stories from other times and you get to explore an ancient civilization immerse yourself in our hot air balloon volume and you get to imagine sailing high above the Earth among the birds and clouds so how do we know then that this poster is motivating kids through
these books and a sense of adventure well because each and every book offers its own kind of Adventure not only does it show the variety of Adventures that kids can have but it offers Adventures that might appeal to different kids so why would we want to go to book week because we'll be able to find books that take us to amazing places in our minds and we'd all like to go amazing places in our minds wouldn't we and we've talked about showing your work or explaining how you know what you know in other videos too
but this is basically how it works so to summarize what do you notice what details or parts of your rhetorical artifact are there to point out so what how do those details contribute to your artifact's persuasive purpose to motivate the audience in a particular way and how do you know how do you really know that those details are working in the way that you say they are these methodological steps are more important when you're writing a rhetorical analysis but they're still useful guiding questions when you're trying to make sense of all the persuasive attempts coming
your way in real life too in fact speaking of real life persuasion I'm going to put an ad break in the video in just a moment so let's take it as a chance to practice these steps if you get an ad pay attention to what it's trying to persuade you to do and how it tries to accomplish that find a detail or two and tell us in the comments how you think it's working when we regroup after I'll tell you about a time not too long ago when the targeted ad system fell apart and served
me some really unpersuasive advertising so are you ready see you back here in just a [Music] minute okay well how'd it go what persuasive message messages did the algorithmic powers think that you were a good audience for and what kinds of strategies did they use to motivate you to buy their wonderful products see when you've gone down this road as far as I have your whole life becomes an examination of everything around you I may or may not have been known to shout at Billboards the way people might shout at sporting events on TV I
mean come on marketing exec what were you thinking who is this even for and it can be especially fun to try to reverse engineer what the algorithms think they know about you based on the ads they serve you for example a few years ago I was getting bombarded with ads for master's degree programs in all kinds of disciplines at all kinds of schools now why on Earth would they think that someone finishing up a PhD would be interested in going to even more school if I were in charge last year grad students would probably be
the last group I would ever advertise more school to but to be fair I had given the algorithm every indication that I was a good fit for those ads because I had been Googling schools for the last several months but I wasn't Googling schools because I was looking to spend more time as a student I was Googling schools as part of my search for a teaching job so the advertisers had the right data but they drawn the wrong conclusions and sometimes targeted ads are hilariously mismatched with who you are as an audience in the second
half of the 20th century mass media like television and radio were sending persuasive messages all around the world and that led to a Resurgence of rhetorical scholarship but where ancient teachers like Aristotle and quintilian were interested in teaching people how to write good speeches modern rhetorical scholarship turned towards understanding and critiquing all of the chatter going on all around us so rhetorical analysis may just feel like another pointless School exercise but it's really a skill for your whole life when you're attentive to the ways that others may be trying to influence or motivate you you
can be more deliberate about the actions you take and the attitudes you adopt and that my friends will put you back in the driver's seat making sure that you're not just mindlessly going along with whoever happens to say the flashiest thing instead you can ask yourself what are they saying why are they saying it and is that something I really want to go along with rhetoric in the hands of evildoers will try to manipulate and deceive but it's so much harder to be deceived when you know how to analyze those manipulative strategies on the other
hand rhetoric in the hands of upstanding people strengthens the appeal of good things and being good at rhetorical analysis will help you to tell the difference so get out there and study the world with your all new rhetorical eyes with rhetorical analysis skills you've got a superpower that honestly not enough people have so use that power for good and maybe even share it with someone you know and we'll meet again in the next one [Music]
